In his eulogy of Democratic
Sen. Robert Byrd, Bill Clinton said that "He once had a
fleeting association with [the] Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean? I [sic]
tell you what it means. He was a country
boy from [the] hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn't have
done and he spent the rest of his life making it up." Presumably this Rhodes scholar meant not
"making it up" but "making up for it," but let me begin my
assessment of the Failed President's funeral oration. (I refer to the words of Clinton; our
current Failed President also said
something ridiculously disingenuous about Byrd, replete with cloying
pseudo-patriotism, but his remarks are outside the scope of this uncommon
commentary.)
1.
What Clinton calls a "fleeting association" with
the KKK began in the early 1940's, when Byrd founded a chapter of that
organization by recruiting 150 new members, who (unanimously) made him their
"Exalted Cyclops" or leader of said chapter; the title seems
accidentally appropriate for so monstrous a man who became so powerful a member
of the US Senate. Byrd would later say
that he ended his membership "after about a year," but as late as
1946 or 1947 he wrote to a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan that "The Klan
is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every
state [sic] in the nation [sic]."
2.
What does Dirty Byrd's having been a country boy, and his
"trying to get elected," have to do with his having been a
Klansman? Was Clinton slandering rural
West Virginians, by saying that Byrd's environs made him a bigot? Or that
racism was so pervasive in the people's hearts and in public debate that he had
to pretend to be one in order to get
their votes? There's something wrong
with this alibi, anyway: When Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan, he was under 25
years of age, and thus wasn't even old enough to stand for public office. Indeed, Byrd said that he never considered a
future in politics until a KKK official told him that he had a talent for
leadership, and that this happened at age 23 or 24, hence, in 1940 or
1941. Furthermore, in 1952, when he
began his career of corruption by campaigning successfully for a seat in the US
House of Representatives, he told the electorate that his participation in the
KKK was a thing of the past.
3.
What did Clinton mean, "maybe" (Byrd "did something he shouldn't have
done")?
4.
How did Byrd make up for the wrong that he had done: by
becoming the congressional "King of Pork?"
It seems to me that it wasn't Byrd but Clinton who was "making it
up," that is to say, fabricating offensive nonsense to disguise the
reality of the late Senator's failed life.
